Merry Xmas from the Zafi worm

Merry Xmas everyone from the W32/Zafi-D worm, which is posing as a Christmas greeting and luring all sorts of gullible users into infecting their PCs with nastiness.

"Experts at Sophos report that the virus is currently accounting for 75% of all virus reports at Sophos's global network of monitoring stations in the last 24 hours."

Spreading inside holiday season goodwill emails, the W32/Zafi-D worm uses a variety of different languages including English, French, Spanish and Hungarian. Embedded inside the email is a lewd animated GIF graphic of two "smiley" faces. I am sure you can imagine the hoards of gullible users clicking on those smiling faces right now, and in doing so unleashing all sorts of horrors.

"Over 1 in every 10 emails travelling across the Internet at the moment is infected with the Zafi-D worm."

Zafi contains many cool virus tricks (or uncool, I should say), some of which generate a lot of e-mail traffic, and are bad for the internet in general. Tactics such as sending viral messages to addresses it finds on infected PCs is one such example, but there are many other methods of propagation that are anti-netizen.